Patrick Comerford
I have been a member of the Stony Stratford Playreaders’ group for almost two years now, and during that time we have met twice a month in the library on Church Street, alternating between well-known, established works and plays by group members. We were part of the Stony Words festival last year, and I’m looking forward to taking part in the programme being prepared for next January.
Last month, I was asked to read the part of Trygaeus in Peace by Aristophanes, a very appropriate choice in the present global climate.
This week, we were reading Dancing at Lughnasa, a play by the Irish writer Brian Friel (1929-2015), first produced in 1990 and set in in the fictional town of Ballybeg, based on Glenties in Co Donegal, in August 1936. The play is set at a time when the Spanish Civil War was breaking out and Italy was invading Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), while in domestic politics Eamon de Valera had been office since 1932, and was about to introduce a new constitution and become Taoiseach in 1937, all referred to by the characters in the play.
This is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator, as he recalls the summer in 1936, when he was a seven-year-old living with his mother Christina and four aunts, the five Mundy sisters – Maggie, Chris, Agnes, Rose, and Kate – and their brother Father Jack, who has returned from a life as a missionary in Uganda.
Lughnasa is the month of August. But, as the summer draws to a close, the family realises sadly that it is facing economic privation and their hopes fade as the realise the dismal futures they face.
Kate is a school teacher, the only sister with a well-paid job. Agnes and Rose help Maggie to keep house and knit gloves, but know this small income is about to dry up when a new knitwear factory opens nearby. Maggie and Chris have no income at all.
Their brother Father Jack is in his late 50s and a former British army chaplain in East Africa during World War I. He has come back home after 25 years as a missionary priest in Ryanga, a leper colony in a remote part of Uganda. He has malaria, and has trouble remembering many things, including his sisters’ names and everyday, common conversational words.
He no longer says Mass, and perhaps the real reasons he has been sent home are that he has ‘gone native’, abandoned much of his Catholic practice – there are hints that perhaps he has either lost his faith or that he was too close to his former ‘house boy’ Okawa.
He admires or respects the beliefs and practices of the native people of Africa. His apparent loss of faith greatly worries or Kate, who is concerned about the family's reputation. Jack refers to Michael as a love child rather than an illegitimate child and says they are common and accepted among the people of Uganda.
In a scene near the close of the play, Jack ceremonially swaps his British colonial feathered tricorn hat, a departing gift from a British governor, for a cap worn by Chris’s lover Gerry Evans, Michael’s Welsh father who is charming but unreliable. Gerry becomes the new, secular missionary, heading off to Barcelona to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
The play takes its name from the occasions when Chris and Gerry go walking and dance and the sisters’ random, spontaneous dancing prompted by intermittent céilí music from a temperamental radio nicknamed Marconi. Their lives are marked by poverty and financial insecurity, lives that are unfulfilled and lead to disaster off-stage.
We learn from Michael’s narrative that Agnes and Rose later die in abject poverty in Southwark in the 1950s, while Michael’s father has a parallel family in Wales, including a half-brother with the same name. For all of this, Michael was surrounded by love in his childhood, and this love is underlined by the way Jack refers to him as a love child rather than an illegitimate child, even though the play is peppered with word ‘bastard’.
Father Jack seems to recover from his malaria or his forgetfulness, but Michael as narrator tells us that he died later of a heart attack soon after the events in the play and he tells us that Kate was inconsolable when Jack died.
The play was originally staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990. It moved to the National Theatre in London in 1991, and later to the Phoenix Theatre and the Garrick, before moving on to Broadway. It was revived in Dublin in 1999-2000, again at the Abbey Theatre, and Joe Dowling directed a new production of the play at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2004. The Old Vic Theatre in London presented a well-received production in 2009 starring Sorcha Cusack, Niamh Cusack, Sinéad Cusack and Andrea Corr.
In various productions, Father Jack has been played by Barry McGovern, Alec McCowen, Donal Donnelly, Des Cave, Michael Countryman, Michael Fitzpatrick, Ardal O’Hanlon and by Michael Gambon in the 1998 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep as Kate Mundy.
Being asked to read the part of Father Jack came as a pleasant surprise. He reminded me of many missionary priests I knew who had worked in Africa, Asia and Latin America and had become incarnational and enculturated in their approach to mission. Perhaps I also identified a little, too, with his problems in finding acceptance of his ministry in retirement. But I also thought of grandfather who had fought in World War I and who had been sent home from Thessaloniki with malaria.
I have only stayed in Co Donegal a half dozen or so times in all my life. But there are few differences from and many parallels between the rural life of the 1930s and the life I remember on my grandmother’s farm near Cappoquin, Co Waterford, in the 1950s and 1960s: the food, the temperamental radio, the difficulties families had in eking out a level, a similar distance into the nearest village, the suspicions of people living in even more remote areas, the lakes and the mountains, families forced to find work in larger towns or cities or to leave and find a living in London, whispered conversations about politics, prejudice and bigotry, and families were sisters were strong and determined women whose hopes and aspirations were always going to be disappointed.
De Valera was still dominating the political landscape, there were memories of Republicans and Blueshirts who went away to join different side in the Spanish Civil War, there was a missionary uncle who never returned, an aunt who was a teacher and a nun, and the Keane family had tried to provide a local industry until the bacon factory closed in 1980.
The ‘Stage’ opposite the Cats provided the same céilí music the sisters listened to, there was a temperamental ‘Marconi’ that ran off a battery and that only picked up the BBC and not Radio Eireann. Prejudice and judgmentalism were still alive in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, and I remember overhearing whispered conversations about the Fethard-on-Sea Boycott in neighbouring Co Wexford.
Lughnasa has passed, we are a long way into September, and summer has turned to autumn. But summers and Augusts in rural Donegal in the 1930s and rural Waterford in the 1950s came alive for me in the library Stony Stratford on Thursday afternoon.
